eCommerce development

LastBid

Ecommerce development for
auction houses

About
the project

Auction houses commonly face the challenge of achieving a 100% sell-through rate, which is remarkably rare. Often, up to 30% of items in auctions remain unsold. Reducing prices just to facilitate a sale is not a viable option for these auction houses, as it could significantly impact their commission earnings.

To address this issue, the LastBid team came up with a solution: a two-sided online marketplace. This platform needed to present unsold lots to a global audience of potential buyers, thereby creating a new opportunity for sales without compromising auction house commissions.

Client

LastBid

Location

San Francisco, California

Project goal

Development of a custom two-sided auction marketplace

Team

Business analyst
Project manager
UX
Back-end developer
Front-end developer

Project timeframe

6 months

Client testimonial

“It is important to find the team that will understand how the end product would look and feel. I actually enjoyed the team’s vision. Thanks to a deep understanding of marketplace development, the team performed the best results. Even though my project was not the simplest one, Dinarys developers offered the most suitable solutions for back-end and front-end. By applying current technologies, the team showed care about the marketplace usability for both sellers and buyers.”

Erik Klinkovich

CTO at GetCider

Key challenges

Selective buyers
Sophisticated product search
Built-in messaging platform
Strict security requirements
High volume of incoming requests and messages
Digital salesroom with a personalized user experience
Demand for a consistent information architecture

Solution provided

LastBid enlisted our team to develop a bespoke two-sided marketplace, with a core requirement for the website to emulate the authentic, time-sensitive nature of traditional auctions. This meant designing a platform where buyers are given a limited time to place bids and secure their purchases.

Event-driven architecture

Bid placement triggers a chain of simultaneous actions on the website’s back end:

The system verifies whether the bid is within a predefined price range.
If the bid exceeds the upper bound, the lot is automatically sold to the bidder.
Each significant action prompts an email notification sent to both parties.
After a bid has been placed, the product page is instantly customized for each user type.

These events happen seamlessly without slowing down the user interface.

The event-driven architecture not only minimizes response times and reduces downtime but also incorporates principles of reliability engineering. This ensures that buyers can reliably check the current bid on a product and make informed purchase decisions.

Simultaneously, sellers benefit from a stable system to monitor buyer interest in their bids, enhancing their ability to make timely sales. The architecture’s resilience and fault tolerance are key in maintaining a continuous, accurate, and real-time data flow between buyers and sellers, which is crucial given the dynamic nature of bidding and selling.

Customer journey mapping

Our team undertook a detailed customer journey mapping process, specifically targeting a discerning and selective buyer group. Our business analysts and UX designers conducted thorough research to fully understand this audience’s unique pains and needs, as such buyers are increasingly selective with their purchases.

Emphasizing a human-centric approach, we concentrated our efforts on enhancing the website’s usability, ensuring it met our targeted clientele’s specific preferences and requirements.

Digital salesroom

Our strategy involves integrating interactive elements and real-time features that simulate the thrill of live auctions. This includes live bidding capabilities, virtual viewing rooms, and interactive catalogs designed to fully immerse the user. We also prioritize user-friendly navigation and responsive design to ensure that every interaction within the digital salesroom is seamless and enjoyable.

By combining these elements — the exhilaration of live auctions, the convenience of digital access, and the personal touch of tailored experiences — our digital salesroom aims to not just replicate but enhance the traditional auction house atmosphere.

Built-in messaging platform

Another key requirement from LastBid was to facilitate communication between users on the platform. To address this, we integrated a custom messenger into the website, enabling buyers to contact sellers directly for key information regarding any bid. This messenger is designed with advanced inbox management features, allowing users to archive, retrieve, and delete conversations as needed.

The messenger is specifically tailored to prioritize and organize dialogues based on certain parameters, ensuring that sellers can efficiently respond to all inquiries about a current bid from various buyers within the auction’s time constraints.

Moreover, to keep platform users informed about critical updates, such as new bids, we implemented Sendgrid’s transactional email services. This ensures timely and relevant notifications are delivered to users, enhancing their engagement and experience on the LastBid platform.

Product search

Sophisticated bidders are looking for an exact match with requested parameters. To satisfy bidders’ requirements, we implemented sophisticated multi-level filters for product categories along with enhanced search functionality. In the admin panel, users have the flexibility to define a variety of product characteristics and associate them with specific product categories. This approach allows for the addition of numerous product attributes tailored to the requirements of respective product categories.

The capability to link characteristics directly to a category significantly optimizes both search and filtering, making it more efficient and user-friendly to navigate through the diverse range of products on the platform.

Payment system

Stripe was selected as the primary payment gateway for our custom two-sided marketplace. Known for its robust security and reliability, Stripe facilitates secure transactions and user authentication via credit card. This integration enhances transactional safety and streamlines the payment process, ensuring a seamless and secure experience for buyers and sellers. The choice of Stripe underscores our commitment to providing a trustworthy and efficient payment solution in the dynamic online auction environment.

Results

Our development team worked hard, and in six months, the client got a two-sided custom marketplace for auction houses. The final outcome aligns seamlessly with our client’s initial specifications, which included: